Joe Murray Studio

Joe Murray paints, draws, animates, writes and designs for print, television and film. His television, film and illustration projects are award winning. He also teaches and consults.

The studio is perhaps best known for the creation, development and production of Nickelodeons animated series Rocko's Modern Life,
and Cartoon Network's Camp Lazlo, as well as several character properties for advertising and marketing, children's books, editorial work and festival films.

A New Animated Trend?

I recently caught two documentaries on netflix which also have a strange trend to them. One was on title sequence artist Pablo Ferro ( Stop Making Sense, Dr. Stranglove) and the other on the very talented artist Tomi Ungerer. Both relied heavily on animation to pace the narrative of the story. The animation used in the Tomi Ungerer animation had a lot more quality to it ( and the subject matter lending itself much more) than the Pablo Ferro animation. Granted both dealt with a highly graphic medium, but while browsing documentaries, I also noticed a Noam Chomsky documentary also illustrating points of conversation with animation.

Are the festivals or competitions bestowing more awards on partly animated documentaries? What has sparked a sudden emergence of this form of storytelling.

Granted I’m not complaining ( okay, a little because the animation for the Pablo Ferro documentary didn’t do justice to the talent the man himself had. )The Tomi Ungerer documentary was just plain brilliant, and would have still held that power without the animation. But the animation held it’s own and added another element to the storytelling that was very welcome.

I just find it quite interesting.

Going in today to the belly of the beast to start a new project. We will see what happens.

One Response to June 2, 2014

That is a great way to think about how to incorporate animation in film I get stuck so often using my work in animation context only. Thanks for sharing and I have to check out the full films now to see how the animation looks in real time.